Our History

Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPCU) is a state approved higher educational institution that is run by the Catholic Church and governed by the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The Congregation of the Catholic Education of the Apostolic Holy See in its decree n° 1151 (on 25th, November 1999) declared that Pázmány University had been established and approved directly by the Holy See. The University has a legal entity both in the legal system of the Catholic Church and that of the State of Hungary. In the Catholic Church the institution is regarded as an official ecclesiastical legal entity. PPCU forms a unique segment of the Hungarian higher education as a non-regional institution with national coverage and as the only single university of the Hungarian Catholic higher education, which is the member of an international research university network.

Our University was founded in 1635 and has been continuously operating ever since. During the Ottoman occupation, the most tragic years of our country's history, Archbishop of Esztergom Péter Pázmány established the university, which proved to be of epochal significance in the history of education and religious culture in Hungary. He was convinced that the university was the only way to guarantee the survival of the nation's moral and intellectual culture.

The university he founded adopted both his intellectual heritage and his name. The university was moved to Buda from Nagyszombat (now Trnava) by Maria Theresa.

In the spirit of the 1848 reforms the university became a modern and autonomous educational centre. After a short period when its self-governance was limited by Habsburg absolutism, it regained its previous rights in 1860, and by the beginning of the 20th century it became one of the world's finest universities. In 1921, after the grisly calamities of World War I and the restrictions imposed on it by the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the "Royal Hungarian University of Science" in Budapest was once again named after its founder, Péter Pázmány, and it bore his name until 1950, when the communist state restructured the university by separating the Faculties of Medicine and Theology, and changed the name of the remaining institution to "Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences". In 1993 the Hungarian Parliament registered Pázmány Péter Catholic University (and along with it the Faculty of Humanities) as a university accredited by the state. We currently have five faculties: the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, the Faculty of Information Technology and the Postgraduate Institute of Canon Law, which also has faculty status.